


swallowing the stars again

by penceyprat



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Feelings, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, M/M, Supernatural Elements, and dan is a dumbass but we love him and he's trying his best, and phil can see like people's auras as colours around them, but with like ghosts sometimes, phil has vague psychic powers, teenagers being teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 16:03:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13298346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penceyprat/pseuds/penceyprat
Summary: “Because this is what we do.” Phil told him, floorboards creaking underfoot as he treaded closer. “As people.” He placed a hand back against the wall of the house, as if to steady himself, if not, to still the forces of whatever lay not quite so dormant within the walls. “We want to show the people that matter the most, the things that matter the most.”Dan tried to hide his blush, but everything with Phil Lester was a weighted die, a rigged game, a losing war, but still he refused to set his cards down to the table - he was stubborn, stupid, perhaps, or instead just irrefutably sixteen years old. Phil smiled at him. Another battle lost.~“Your colours, they’re yellow.”Dan laughed it off, hoping the darkness could hide the revealing shade of pink his cheeks had once again turned. “Way to sound like a Coldplay song.”~[Or the one with the colours and falling in love and keeping secrets that were never secrets at all]





	swallowing the stars again

“I sold my soul for the last train home.”

He toed at the earth underfoot, like he didn’t quite know what to do with his body, like he’d never learned about his feet and how to hold them. After all, the weight of one living, breathing human being was quite a lot to hold up alone.

Those eyes watched him, as if sketching out their own reality around him, following the fluttering lines and patterns surrounding his body, ones that the naked eye couldn’t quite make out. He was different, of course, the boy with his head up against the old, wooden panels of the house interior, with white paint chips falling into his lap, and cobwebs hanging from his fingertips.

“How does that sound?”

He tried again, although his voice felt entirely wrong in the air around them. It wasn’t quite somber enough, it wasn’t quite booming enough to hold ground, even to an audience of one.

Arguably, he was different too, if only his head would have him believe it. Yet, it seemed, these days, that head of his was putting up an awfully good fight.

“How do you want it to sound?” That boy asked him, voice deeper than it should have been, with eyes etching him a new reality in shades of blue and green. Dan liked to spend his afternoons pretending that he wasn’t in love.

“It’s not about how I  _ want _ it to sound.” His cheeks heated up, as he pulled his eyes away - embarrassed, and instead busied himself with picking at a drying blade of grass.

“Isn’t that  _ exactly _ the point of poetry though?” He was always smarter than him, as if he prided himself upon taking every opportunity to rub the extra two years he had on him in Dan’s face. Although, logically thinking, Phil wasn’t like that - Phil wasn’t like that at all.

Dan made a face. Still, he didn’t look up.

Both boys remained silent for a while, sitting too close, and simultaneously too far apart, in the garden of the old, abandoned house. It was a mansion only by its own decree, with uninviting, cramped interiors, and cobwebs littering the chipped woodwork, but with an air of mystery, a sense of inexplicable allure to it. Even Phil, with all of his oddities and extra senses seemed unable to define the exact nature of the place; a matter that seemed to bother Dan more than it should have.

In actuality, the place was an old trailer, left abandoned up on the hill, past the train-tracks, in the forgotten part of the outskirts of town. Phil had gathered that the place had been abandoned for the upwards of sixty years, by the indentations of the dust and cobwebs alone, and running his fingertips against walls and railings while looking pensive and picking up echoes and ruminating sound that no one else would have grasped.

The grass grew long and dry up in the gardens and fields that stretched out for miles, as if all hopes of civilization had been long forgotten. The world was quiet - not quite dead, but awfully good at pretending, and that was exactly the kind of place they needed to be.

The miracles that Phil Lester could work between his fingertips, wound around the universe with just a look, longed for the silence and the space, places of the world the rest of them had forgotten. Dan’s head, or so he liked to think, worked in similar ways too.

“You’re upset with me.” Phil told him, presenting it like a statement, an assured fact, as opposed to a suggestion or accusation.

Dan made another face, putting it on a bit too strong, all too much, writhing and thrashing for a boy that was already sinking too deep. 

_ ”I’m not.” _ Dan laughed it off, too bitter, and all too exposed, like he had no skin at all, but instead was just a boy of raw, broken, bleeding nerves, on display for the world. 

In actuality, of course, he wouldn’t even be surprised if Phil looked at him with those sea blue eyes and told him that he could see him, right down to his nerves, right through his veins, and down to that heart hammering inside of his chest. The playing field between them had never been level at all, and yet they’d still yearned to pretend.

“Dan,” Phil drew out a sigh - tired, but not quite  _ tired-with-him, _ “I can see it.”

Dan pulled on a frown, and wished for a moment too long that he’d befriended any boy but the one that could read the indentations and impressions of emotions and memories like they’d been printed into the world around him. He wished for a second moment, that he’d been anyone but the boy that had grown accustomed to being careless with his emotions, wearing them on his sleeve, and apparently all across his cheeks too.

“Maybe you’re wrong.” Dan didn’t know what he was doing - whether he was aiming just to have Phil drop it, or to chip into the boy behind that armour, to feel the impact when it stung him back against his own skin.

“No.” Phil wrung his lips around a smile, shaking his head. “I can  _ always _ tell with you.” 

Dan rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe your  _ ’everything’s brighter with you’ _ bullshit-“

“But it  _ is.” _ Phil interjected, meeting Dan eye-to-eye. “I can’t ignore you. They’re so bright, almost obnoxious-“

“Well,  _ thank you-“ _

“Not you, Dan.” Phil dug out a sigh. “Your emotions, your aura, your being.”

“Yes.” Dan drew a line out into the dirt. “Of course.”

He wished he could be a skeptic, but there was hope for such a thing, not after all the things he’d seen. Not after all the things Phil had shown him.

Dan pressed his palm out onto the earth; splayed fingertips sunk into the earth. He felt the weight of Phil’s eyes upon him, and that begging question rising behind his lips.

“I’m not upset with you.” Dan said. “I’m upset with myself. Maybe sometimes you do read things wrong.”

Phil thought for a moment, crossing and uncrossing his legs several times, before letting them stretch out across the dirt, and fall precariously into what they might have described as ‘Dan’s space’.

“Maybe sometimes I do.” He met Dan’s eyes, like they were planets he wanted to pull from their orbit, and into his own. “I’m not denying that.”

“No.” Dan nodded along, pulling his hands in close to his chest - at once, all so unsure as to what he ought to do with himself; how he ought to present himself to the boy that could read behind any facade.

“It’s a good line.” Phil offered up, watching Dan squirm and stumble with himself.

“What?” Dan frowned, too loud and too quiet all at once, and so, so,  _ so _ unsure of himself.

“  _ ’I sold my soul for the last train home.’ _  It’s a good line.” He smiled. “You’re a better writer than you think you are.”

Dan made a face, forever with the facades - and to what end? Phil could see through them all; he knew this well, and yeah he could stop with pretence after pretence. He wished Phil might start calling him out on it - to bring out the burning in his cheeks, to get him to toe the line and play nice with his most rampant thoughts, but Phil Lester was far too polite for that kind of thing. He was exactly the sort of boy that  _ deserved _ to have psychic powers of some description.

“You’re welcome.” Phil shuffled away from the wall of the house, and moved himself a little closer to Dan.

He blinked up at him. “I-… I didn’t-“

“Shut up.” Phil smiled at him. He didn’t stop moving until they were sat side by side, touching at exactly four points - not that Dan was counting, and not that Dan was blushing, because there was no hope in hiding anything when Phil Lester could tell what he’d had for breakfast just by looking at him.

“I wish you’d let me compliment you.” Phil said, watching the cloud sweep over the afternoon sun and turn brilliant blue skies a cloudy grey.

“I wish you’d think of something better to do with your time.” Dan stretched out, lying back against the grass, pretending, if only to himself, that it was more than just an excuse to put a little distance between them - so his heart might manage to still within his chest.

“What do you mean?” Phil laughed, following suit and leaning back against the grass beside him.

“I mean…” Dan drew out a sigh. “You’re eighteen years old, you have your whole life ahead of you, and never-mind that, fucking psychic powers, and what are you doing? Laying around with some random kid in a field? You could be saving the world or something.”

“Tell me then,  _ Howell.” _ Phil rolled onto his side, looking at Dan directly. “Just how do you imagine that I’m going to save the world with a slight psychic inclination-“

“Slight psychic inclination, my fucking  _ arse.” _ Dan had found that covering his emotions with excessive vulgarity seemed to work at times, although the results were often questionable.

Phil laughed, shaking his head. “I told you.” He lowered his voice, to a whisper, to the wrong kind of intimate that had Dan’s chest hollowed out enough to leave his heart thundering against his ribs. 

“Everything’s brighter with you, everything’s louder, and back in civilization everything else is so loud and so colourful that I can barely make anything out.” Phil smiled, holding their eyes tight together. “I’m useless, really.”

Dan shook his head. “No you’re not. Don’t you dare say that- I won’t have you saying shit like that.”

“Won’t you?” Phil rolled over onto his back, staring up at the skies. The air wasn’t as warm as it had been once; the afternoon made it clear that it was wasting away around them; that time wasn’t the endless commodity that teenage idiosyncrasies painted it out to be.

“No.” Dan told him, although his words were feeble at best. “If you’re useless then I think they’re going to have to invent a new word for how utterly unimportant I am-“

“Shut up.” Phil rolled over, his voice deeper, a little sterner than it ought to have been. “I don’t like you talking badly about yourself.”

“I don’t like you talking badly about yourself either.” Dan exclaimed, talking more with his eyes than his lips, but comfortably certain that Phil would understand him perfectly either way.

“But you don’t see what I see.” Phil sat up, lowering his voice further; he sounded solemn, unlike himself, and instead at one with the rotting wood and long dead trees.

“What do you see?” Dan sat up too, splaying his legs out into the long grass, caring not for the insects that might crawl over his legs and feet, as if he was just another part of the earth. Nothing else seemed to matter much anymore, when the iridescent shimmer to Phil’s eyes began to dull.

“When you say things like that, when you start to lose faith in yourself, all the colours around you, they turn grey. Some even fizzle out into the air- and it’s just… normally, the colours around you, that your thoughts and being produce, they’re not… they’re not just like normal colours. I can’t explain- I wish, I  _ wish _ I could show you, but all I can say is that please believe me when I tell you that they’re brighter, more vibrant than anything else I’ve ever seen.”

Dan held his tongue, but let his mouth fall wide open. He felt his cheeks burning up, but cared not to hide them, for the simple reality that there was not a single thing worth ambling to hide away from Phil Lester and those beautiful eyes of his.

“Have you written that line down?” Phil asked him, changing the subject seemingly rather randomly.

Dan nodded, unsure if he was even able to speak.

“Good. I don’t want you to lose it.” Phil glanced up to the skies above. “There’s going to be a storm soon - we should be getting home.”

Dan got to his feet, his legs trembling, like he didn’t quite know how to use them, and striving so desperately to cover it all with a laugh. 

“And what colour did you see that told you that? Or was that more of just a psychic  _ inkling?” _ His tone was teasing, regurgitating things Phil had told him before, but his voice stumbled as it attempted to thread together the cracks. Of course, to Phil, he’d given himself away before he’d even begun.

“No.” Phil laughed. “Less to do with anything ‘psychic’, this one, and more to do with all those clouds above us turning grey - even you can see that one.” As if to prove it, Phil pointed up to the clouds gathering overhead.

Despite the bitter taste in his mouth, caught with his tongue buried behind his teeth, Dan looked up above, and sure enough, the clouds above seemed eager to give way to rain.

On the last train home, with his head pressed against the glass, Phil to his left, watching the raindrops roll down the window with a sense of insatiable satisfaction, Dan drew the dots together in his head.

Unlike Phil, he didn’t crave the loneliness and the silence - he needed it. Only with the world lost on him, and his eyes screwed shut, could he unravel the shotgun thoughts that had wrecked havoc upon his brain. 

What had once been a thought, woven from a mere inkling, had become a line, and as he held it up for the world to know, a few others seemed keen to join it - to bare their allegiance under the banner of the one secret that Daniel Howell might have actually managed to keep.

-

Dust gathered around his fingertips, as if he’d become a magnet for everything unearthly and forgotten in this house. Dan lingered a few metres behind him, and with good reason, however Phil didn’t seem at all bothered by the prospect at all.

“Is that…” Dan tried to speak, engaging in a verbal battle with the air, and the whistling breeze that Phil was working on convincing him was attributed to nearby ethereal presences and not just the fancies of the weather.

Phil paused, pulling his hands away from the woodwork of the building. It was the sixth ‘haunted’ house they’d visited since start of summer - Dan was starting to wonder if they were developing a problem. Surely, it wasn’t healthy to spend all your afternoons lost up inside old abandoned homes, putting trust in the rotten wood and brickwork not to crumble in over your head. Dan’s real problem, of course, was the unlimited amount of trust he was prepared to put in anything that Phil said.

“If it was a ghost.” Phil narrowed his eyes; his tone too teasing, almost condescending, bracing Dan’s skin in a manner that felt too cold, even chastising, but even in the chill, his blood began to burn. “You wouldn’t be able to see it anyway.”

Dan made a face, kicking at the floorboards with the toe of his trainers. The dust didn’t flock to him in the way it did to Phil - the house seemed to regard him as an intruder in a different manner to Phil, in a way that neither of them could really begin to understand, nevermind explain.

“Be respectful.” Phil turned, his voice deepening considerably as he met Dan’s gaze. “I didn’t bring you here just to mess around.”

Dan shrugged it off, hating the way his cheeks burned pink under Phil’s gaze. It was times like these that he felt their age difference, finding himself swallowed up by the maturity and self-assurance that Phil had come into habit of radiating; he’d almost taken to basking in the glow of such qualities, or some other measly excuse, just to make for everything he couldn’t help but lack.

“What did you bring me here for then?” Dan bit his lip. He chewed down at the tender flesh hard enough to draw blood. Maybe he was depraved enough to want that, with the stormy afternoon protruding down onto his brow.

Phil stopped for a moment - it appeared that he hadn’t anticipated Dan to act quite so petulantly; although petulant wasn’t the word Phil would have used. Phil wasn’t sure what kind of word he could possibly use to describe Dan Howell, but he knew for fact that it wasn’t one he held within his vocabulary. Dan had the affinity for words, not him, after all, if he would dare admit it to himself.

“Because this is what we do.” Phil told him, floorboards creaking underfoot as he treaded closer. “As people.” He placed a hand back against the wall of the house, as if to steady himself, if not, to still the forces of whatever lay not quite so dormant within the walls. “We want to show the people that matter the most, the  _ things _ that matter the most.”

Dan tried to hide his blush, but everything with Phil Lester was a weighted die, a rigged game, a losing war, but still he refused to set his cards down to the table - he was stubborn, stupid, perhaps, or instead just irrefutably sixteen years old. Phil smiled at him. Another battle lost.

“I want to show you this whole other world. Even if you can’t see it with your eyes. I want you to understand all the things that get left behind.” Phil pressed his palm flat against the wall. “I can feel it, like someone’s speaking in the woodwork, but…”

He trailed off, moving to press his ear up against the wall. Dan watched, still, silent, from a distance. 

“But… I can’t hear a thing.” Phil shook his head, turning to Dan. 

“Am I being too loud?” Dan blushed, folding his arms up to his chest. “Are you sure it isn’t best if I go-“

“If you were too loud for me to hear a thing then I wouldn’t bother inviting you with me.” Phil shook his head. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t call me stupid.” Dan made a face, too brash, and too bold, with one foot daring to venture outside of himself.

Phil looked him up and down, trying to read him from the colours he radiated out into the air, only to meet him with a frown. “Press your hand against the wall.”

Dan frowned, looking from Phil to the wall and back again. “What-?”

“Just…” Phil stammered, his cheeks burning up. “I want to try something.”

Dan made a face, too dubious, too naive, and hidden behind too many fronts. He’d long forgotten what he’d even been yearning to defend himself from. “You think I can’t see anything, but if I touch that wall, I’m going to-“

“No.” Phil told him, shaking his head. “Just listen to me, just this once, Howell.”

Dan didn’t even want to imagine what kind of colours he was radiating in that moment, when Phil slung his last name around this lips like it was a crime. Hopeless, flustered, he had no hope but to comply.

“There.” Phil announced, all too smug and all too proud, sandwiching his fingers in the gaps between Dan’s, and pressing his palm flush against the back of Dan’s hand in order to reach the wall.

Dan pretended there was any hope in pretending not to be embarrassed. Lost, dazed, he busied himself with thoughts and words and any attempt at tangibility.

“So…” He tried to breathe but it came out more like a gasp. Phil bit his lip, and Dan wished he could imagine this world in any other way except one in which Phil Lester was pretending not to laugh at him. “Can you hear anything?”

“No.” Phil wrung out a smile. “But I can feel your pulse throughout my whole body- it’s deafening, it’s-“

Dan wrenched his hand away, cheeks burning red. “This was just a ruse to embarrass me, wasn’t it?”

Phil looked him up and down, in a way that those eyes shouldn’t. Dan wondered, for one terrible, terrible moment, just what Phil Lester saw when he looked at him, other than a nervous wreck, of course - that seemed to be a given these days.

“No.” Phil told him, although he hardly succeeded in sounding very convincing. “Maybe it was a ruse, but just to make you blush.”

Dan’s heart stopped and skidded so hard he damn near saw white. “Is that any-  _ better-?” _ He stammered, unable to quite make sense of his words, or anything at all for that matter.

Phil smiled, unable to restrain his heart from thundering in his chest. “Trust me, Howell, I have good intentions.”

Dan took a step back, blinded and bewildered, and feeling so very fucking  _ sixteen years old. _ “Somehow…” He stammered, eyes to the floor, eyes to the ceiling, wishing a ghost might just reveal itself so they’d have something else to talk about. “Somehow, I find that hard to believe.”

Phil smiled, like he knew more than he was letting on; Dan didn’t doubt for a minute that he did, because it was Phil Lester, after all - the boy who’d come to paint pictures with the colours his feelings radiated.

They didn’t find any ghosts that afternoon, in the end, but neither boy left that house without a little piece of what they’d been looking for.

-

He was writing, or at least trying to. Everything kept coming out in run-on sentences, in unordered sprawls of sentiment, words and emotion spewed out into his phone screen. He thought of all these emotions entangled with one another - it was impossible to discern where one ended and the other began. He thought then of all their colours, and what Phil might make of the mess he’d come up with that night.

Dan put his head in his hands and wished for the night to take him away, like he was truly as weightless as he yearned to feel. His brain had grown loose on its tether, aching and twitching in his skull, as it strived to detach from his body, drifting off into the night sky, and leaving the rest of him with a feeble existence to deal with.

He wondered what it felt like to touch the stars.

He wondered what it felt like to swallow them whole _. _

And then the words were flowing again, his brain worked best when he was not himself; corporeality in itself was a distraction, with too many limbs and organs, an endless supply of blood and skin, when really he was nothing but thought, with colours too bright, and nights that felt too cold. He lived through them all, all the same, even if he had to live through them alone.

The nighttime air was cold against his skin, but he bared through the shivers for the sake of the gratitude he found in the company. There was a whole world just beneath him; he might have even been foolish enough to imagine that he was sitting on top of it. Only that was a fantasy for another night, one in which he wasn’t quite so sober, and his grip on life wasn’t quite so sharp and crushing.

He’d forgotten whose idea it had been in the beginning; the evening had long stretched out around him, with the darkness blanketing him, but he didn’t mind - he imagined the moon needed someone to hold on lonely nights just as much as he did. The truth of it all, the bitter, unfortunate truth of it all was that Dan Howell was at a party, or at least in body if not in spirit. Because, of course, Dan Howell was at a party, or at least the same house in which the party was happening, but had hidden himself away in one of the upstairs rooms, trying to turn out words of some worth to him.

It had probably been his own fault anyway. Most things seemed to be.

Dan stared out at the stars, and imagined just the kind of wishing it would take to bring them crashing down to him. He imagined he’d have to steal the skies to be in with any kind of real chance. Though, in earnest, he was just as much a thief as he was a poet - stealing people’s words, people’s feelings, and twisting them into his own decrepit fantasies - his own perfectly crafted ideas about things.

He wondered, at last, because his thoughts always came back to this - just what Phil would think of him, if he read his work,  _ properly. _ If Dan let him take things as they were; if he gave up upon being endlessly meticulous; if he allowed himself to look up and feel the sunshine without the fear of the skies caving in over his head.

The bedroom door clicked open. 

Dan froze. He wasn’t supposed to be up here. He wasn’t supposed to be here, at all - but that was a thought with a different kind of sentiment behind it, entirely.

Footsteps. So soft, so gentle, against the carpet, as if the intruder didn’t dare make any kind of imprint, as if they feared the kind of mark they’d leave behind.

_ ”Dan.” _

He turned his head.

Those eyes looked down at him. He wondered how he could have foreseen anything different coming of the night, but reminded himself once more that it was Phil with the slightly questionable psychic abilities and not himself.

_ ”Phil.” _ He mirrored his tone; it was a poor man’s job at convincing himself they’d ever been on the same page, even like this. In the end, he resigned himself to silence, to soft brown eyes, watching a boy climb onto the windowsill beside him like he was taking stage in front of the whole world.

“Writing again?” Phil smiled.

“Huh?” Dan stammered, flustered features and twitching eyes; he was the antithesis of charismatic.

Phil eyed his phone, knowingly; his smile became a smirk. Phil Lester was the antithesis of reason itself. Not that Dan had ever been one for rational thought, with a crippling kind of anxiety that broke his thoughts off at the throat, and left them discarded and spasming in a million, bloodied pieces, but still. Still, Phil Lester was the kind of boy gave Dan’s head a run for its money.

“Can I see?” Phil asked, pulling a knee up to his chest. He didn’t ask the simple questions, or perhaps the  _ sensible questions, _ like ‘What are you doing alone in a dark room at a party?’ or ‘Are you sure you want to be here?’ or ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’, or maybe even ‘Why can’t you stop thinking about that time our hands touched last week?’

Dan coughed. He almost wished to god that it had been anyone else to find him up here alone. He didn’t even know Phil was at this party; he didn’t even know Phil went to parties- hell, he didn’t even know  _ he, _ himself, went to parties, yet there they both were.

Phil smiled - it was one to rival all the stars in the sky. “You’re yellow.” He said.

Dan blinked across at him, dumbfounded, head dunked into the darkness like it was six feet of water, drowning in an ocean of his own thought, and the eyes of a boy he should have stayed away from. Only, there was no hope in any of that now - what was done was done, and Phil was smiling, even now, like he knew how to do nothing else.

“What?” He asked, at last, finding his words, and wondering just when he’d lost them.

“Your colours, they’re yellow.”

Dan laughed it off, hoping the darkness could hide the revealing shade of pink his cheeks had once again turned. “Way to sound like a Coldplay song.”

Phil’s eyes almost rolled back into their sockets. Still, the corners of his lips tugged at the notion of a smirk - he had seen Dan blush,  _ of course. _ He’d been an idiot for even so much as imagining otherwise.

“I’m serious.” Phil continued, once the silence had settled back in between them, like a calm tide, like the hand of a friend with too much time to spare, like the kind of secrets that could never stay hidden. “You’re hardly  _ ever _ yellow. What are you thinking about?”

Phil leaned forward, so much so that their knees were almost touching - not that Dan had noticed or anything, only, once Dan had noticed, there was no way around the fact that Phil had noticed that Dan had noticed, and-

Phil leaned back a little. He was too polite, too respectful. Dan didn’t know what he’d done to deserve this boy.

“I…” Dan stammered, at a loss for words, at a loss for everything, like this evening was an ocean, and he was already in knee deep, with the water forever rising,  _ rising, rising- _

“Oh…” Phil’s voice softened. “It’s gone now. The yellow.”

Dan looked back up at him, eyes wide like saucers, and quivering - he was certain he’d made some kind of mistake. 

“Ah.” Phil shook his head, mildly disappointed, but by no means upset. “Nevermind. What were you thinking about, anyway?”

Dan bit his lip.

_ You. _

“What does…” Dan’s voice wavered, like it wasn’t quite strong enough to hold the weight of all those rampant thoughts, all those emotions held flush against his heart until they began to burn. “What does yellow mean?”

Phil shrugged. “They don’t necessarily  _ mean _ anything… it’s more of… I don’t know… a reflection…” He tilted his head to the side, as if examining Dan more closely. “You tend to be a violet, or a lilac, half-shades of purple. It just made such a difference. It surprised me.”

Dan frowned, thinking for a moment. “When you look at yourself in the mirror, what colours do you see around yourself?”

Phil laughed, shaking his head. “It doesn’t work like that. What you see in the mirror is never a true reflection of yourself. You know that - we all think we look different to what we actually do.”

“So…” Dan’s brow furrowed. “You don’t actually know what colours you give off?”

“No.” Phil shook his head. “I don’t.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No. Not really.” Phil tilted his head to one side, as if he’d taken to looking at Dan a little differently. “I  _ mean… _ you can’t see them at all - doesn’t that bother you?”

_ ”Yes.” _ Dan exclaimed, although with a certain lack of enthusiasm. “Immensely.”

Phil shook his head in mock-disbelief. “Does it  _ really?” _

“I guess…” Dan dragged his words out; there was a sense of reluctance to his voice - he was all hedges and one step forward, two steps back. “I guess not.”

“There you go.” Phil closed the distance between them again. Dan wondered what kind of colours he could possibly be radiating now. “I mean, I already know what I’m thinking, don’t I?”

“I don’t always know what  _ I’m _ thinking.” Dan drew out a sigh, all lacklustre laughter, and spending time like it was spare change.

Phil’s smile dampened a little. “What were you thinking about earlier? Maybe we can figure out what yellow means.”

“I think I  _ know _ what yellow means.” Dan said, before he could think better of it enough to stop himself.

“Oh?” Phil pulled back, all wide-eyes and apprehension - for once, he was one step behind.

Dan tugged his lips around a smirk. “How much would it kill you if I just never told you?”

“It would kill me…” Phil paused, trying to find the right word.  _ ”Immensely.” _

“I could do that, you know?” Dan couldn’t wipe the smirk from his lips. “Just let this be the one secret I could finally keep from you.”

“But what’s the fun in that?” Phil tugged out a frown, trying not to look too disappointed.

“You’ll see.” Dan told him. “You’ll see.”

Phil frowned, cheeks red, and eyes a little put out. “Show me what you’ve written, at least.”

“No.” Dan swung his legs from the windowsill. “Not just yet.”

There was a smile attached to his lips - it was a compulsion, parasitic, because despite all his efforts he could never subdue it.

He watched Phil for a moment. Stunned silence looked good on his lips. Almost as good as they’d look against his own- 

Dan stopped himself.

Phil’s eyes perked up, only for him to narrow them again. He didn’t have to say it; Dan already knew - his colours, were shining the brightest shade of yellow.

-

"You look tired." 

It was an understatement; Phil had been up all night. It was almost as if there was something, or perhaps  _ someone _ keeping him awake. 

Dan was oblivious, with his eyes sat off like stars into the distance; god, Phil loved watching him. He yearned desperately, ever since that night at the party, to see Dan surrounded by a golden yellow glow once again, but as the days had grown many in number and his hopes few and far between, he'd grown rather accustomed to the shades of pale wisteria that had made themselves a home around Dan's head as of late. 

"I  _ am _ tired." Phil told him; a smile stretching his lips, stretching what really should have been his patience, but Dan had longed seem to defy any kind of rule or reason Phil Lester had once set out for himself. In fact, he was starting to believe that he was far more content with such a notion than he should have been. 

“Ghosts keeping you up at night, huh?” Dan made for a smile, playing the lighthearted angle, but finding his tone falling through, as he caught the rather sobering look Phil turned to him with.

“No.” Phil told him. His voice was curt, tight, drawing a line on the ground between them two of them. They were sat together on a bench, at the train station, barely centimetres between them, but they had never felt so distant in all the world.

“What then?” Dan asked, his voice softening, with desperation, or whatever was left lingering between them.

_ ”You.” _ Phil got to his feet, because he was a boy with guts if nothing else.

Dan stared blankly, speechless, hopeless, and broken down into a thousand pieces.

“That’s our train.” Phil said, pointing towards the train pulling into the platform. He addressed Dan without even looking at him. “Come on. You don’t want to miss it, do you?”

With reluctance, with hesitance, with limbs that suddenly felt far too big for his body, and a body that felt far too big for his head, Dan found his feet eventually, because Phil’s words fell like heavy, leaden weights in his chest, and he couldn’t help but wonder what kept a boy who could feel the presence of the dead up at night.

Phil seemed to sense once Dan was back on his feet, and headed off through the platform, cutting through the early afternoon crowds, before boarding the train, and finding them a table seat a little way into one of the carriages.

They both opted for window seats, sitting eye-to-eye, once Dan had trailed in behind him, still wordless, and stammering, staring across at the boy with his cheek pressed to the window glass. Dan felt truly,  _ immensely, _ like he’d been him before, perhaps weeks ago now, before this had all began, properly.

“I was thinking about you.” Phil said, at last, five minutes into the train ride, once he was certain that Dan wasn’t going to ask, or even that Dan wasn’t going to unfreeze until he prompted him.

Dan hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d sat in his seat, with his palms pressed down to the table, and his phone nestled firmly in his pocket, untouched. It was a notion that felt unnatural, particularly of a boy who seemed to be glued to his phone, despite all his best efforts, despite the world opening up around him in shining colours.

“I…” Dan’s words caught in his throat. He swallowed. Looked up. Looked down. Looked out to the window and the world beyond the both of them.

“There was a woman on the platform. She was purple, like you. Very similar shades of purple, but not quite the same. She was with her boyfriend. He was blue, green, turquoise, flickering between them, like his head was all over the place. You know, people in relationships tend to be complementary colours to each other?”

“Mmm…” Dan looked up, taking a moment to fully register what Phil had just told him. “Blue isn’t a complementary colour to purple. Do you even know what complementary colours  _ are?” _

Phil flushed an unflattering shade of red. “Colours that look good together…?”

“That’s kind of subjective, isn’t it?” Dan rolled his eyes, pressing his head back against the glass. Some of the tension had been relieved at the very least.

“Then tell me…” Phil trailed off, stretching his hands out across the table, as if daring Dan to meet him half-way. “Tell me, Howell, what  _ is _ a complementary colour?”

“They’re opposite each other on the colour wheel.” Dan raised his eyebrows; his name felt so intoxicating on Phil’s lips; he wished there was still any hope for digging himself out of this hole they had fallen into.

“So what’s purple’s complementary colour?” Phil asked him, with a genuine kind of curiosity bubbling behind his eyes.

“Yellow.” Dan said without thinking, without realising what they’d let that colour mean.

Phil rose his eyebrows.  _ ”Oh.” _

“Was that what you were thinking about last night?” Dan pressed his chin into the palm of his hand, far too playfully, as if he didn’t even value the breath that left his lips. Phil eyed him, tentatively. 

“I’m clueless.” Phil admitted. “It’s not a colour I see on people very often.”

Dan wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment or not; he said nothing at all.

“I think it’s interesting, though. The fact that yellow and purple are complementary colours. I think that means something.” Phil leant back in his seat, eyeing Dan meticulously.

“You think  _ everything _ means something. You see a crack in a wall and you think it has some dual nature about souls being shattered or something-“

“And you think that’s stupid?” Dan shook his head.  _ ”Ridiculous?” _

“I…” Dan stammered, out of words, out of breath, and waist-deep in water that was only rising higher.

“You do.” Phil told him, smiling.

“Just a bit.” Dan admitted, his chest caving in.

“Well…” Phil tugged at the corners of a smirk. “You know why? That’s because you don’t see the world the same way I do. And maybe a crack in a wall does have some dual nature… maybe it’s just something you can’t  _ see.” _

“I don’t care about seeing cracks in walls and whatever the fuck, though, I just-“ Dan cut himself off, sighing.

“What  _ do _ you care about seeing?” Phil asked, leaning closer, like it was a secret, kept between the two of them.

“I just want to see you.” Dan kept his eyes to the window, too embarrassed, trapped in water rising deeper by the second, with no sense nor air in his lungs anymore. “I want to see your colours, I want to know what they look like. I even wish you could see.”

“It bothers you?” Phil raised an eyebrow.

“It doesn’t seem fair.” Dan bit his lip. “That you can stay awake all night thinking about what the colour yellow means, and I… I don’t have a clue. It’s like you know me better than I know you and that’s-“

“Dan.” Phil’s voice was deeper than usual, gentle, softer, like there was more than just two years between them. “They’re just colours. They don’t define me and they don’t define you.”

‘They don’t define us,’ was what he should have said, but he hadn’t quite had the guts for it.

Dan looked at him for a minute. It was a long minute, laborious, even. He closed his eyes, as if the world had gotten too bright, and let out a sigh. “What colour do you think you are, mostly, at least? Tell me?”

“I don’t know.” Phil shrugged, thinking for a moment. “I’m not sure those are the kind of judgements you can make about yourself. I mean.. would you call yourself mainly purple?”

Dan made a disgusted face; it was an astutely chosen non-verbal ‘no’.

“Exactly.” Phil stretched his legs out under the table; they brushed against Dan’s, more than just not-quite-accidentally. “What colour would you think I am, then?”

“God, Phil.” Dan laughed it off, shaking his head. “How in the fuck would I have any idea?”

He made a good game, forever pretending, pretending, lying through his teeth to a boy that could see it all in the air that surrounding him, for Dan had been a lost cause since day one, and the truth had buried them both neck-deep.

_ ’Yellow.’ _ He would have said, in another world.  _ ’I think you’d be yellow.’ _ Dan would have said in another world, in which he’d had the guts to speak his mind, at last.

-

“So tell me about the complementary colours thing.” Dan was all over-exaggerated gestures as they navigated the convoluted maze of train station corridors a little way off into the countryside.

Phil was looking for the toilets, and Dan was looking for a bin; they were both wishing Phil had been born with psychic abilities that were just a little more practical.

“What do you mean?” Phil asked, turning over his shoulder to look at him.

“I mean…” Dan flushed, floundering with his words, as he looked around for a sign leading to the toilets. “Like… the couples thing. If you look around now, is it actual  _ complementary _ colours, or is it just colours that are similar?”

“I don’t tend to focus on random people in crowds, you know?” Phil told him, his voice hushed. “And keep your voice down, if you’re going to talk about things like that in public.”

Dan mumbled a quick, “Sorry,” holding back as Phil offered him a quick smile before wandering off into the gents. Dan slipped his empty water bottle into the bin just outside, and turned to his phone to pass the time.

He came to reflect on the absurdity of the situation - that this was what he found himself doing, writing lines, making a stab at eloquence outside a train-station bathroom, watching the streams of people pass him by, so unaware, just like he had been once, of the colours that followed them like clouds.

Phil returned from the bathroom, minutes later, leaving Dan staring down at his phone, not having written more than a single word. Phil offered up a sympathetic smile to him, as if somehow, he understood,  _ everything. _

“Are red and green complementary colours?” He asked, a question that should have been innocent in nature.

Dan nodded.

“Yeah.” Phil bit his lip. “Thought so.” And refused to elaborate further.

They ended up no further than twenty minutes walk from the station, out into the barren countryside again; having yearned for the quiet hum of the world forgotten by the rest of things. The summer sun beamed down on them, like a blessing, like a gift, but fuck, did she burn, despite everything.

Dan was splayed out on his back, staring up at the sky, looking for answers in the clouds, in the birds migrating south for winter, in all that had grown disenchanted with the world around them. He was trying to write a stanza, to finish a line at best - to have more to say for himself, for the both of them, that the word  _ ’yellow’, _ but this it seemed, was the way they had come to be.

Phil cleared his throat, staring out from the hilltop and out onto the country trail below. Dan sat up, following his gaze out to the small family unpacking hiking equipment from the trunk of their car, a little way off by the roadside.

“What colour are the parents?” Dan asked him, instinctively.

Phil shook his head. “I can’t quite see from here.”

“You think they’re gonna come up?” Dan asked, referring to the hill they’d thrown themselves down on.

Phil nodded. “I mean… the hill the other side is just… bad energy, you don’t have to be me to feel that.”

Dan scoffed.  _ ”Bad energy.” _

“Yeah.” Phil drew out a sigh, giving Dan a gentle shove. In his defence, Dan did  _ try _ not to blush, although he was hardly getting very far at all. “The colour black. It doesn’t tend to mean good things.”

“They’re coming up.” Dan nudged him, pretending it was more than just an excuse to get close to him, to get bolder with the circumstance and the afternoon wind in his hair, and-“

“Peach and turquoise…” Phil frowned, watching the way the mother smiled at something her husband said to her, likely a dumb dad joke, or something of the like. The kids seemed to roll their eyes, at least.

“What?” Dan asked, squinting down at the couple.

“Oh… she…” Phil shook his head, frowning a little. “That’s…  _ interesting.” _

“What’s interesting?” Dan pressed him, growing more impatient by the moment.

“She turned peach.” Phil explained, keeping his voice down. “When she really smiled at him, when he told a dumb joke. I think that’s it… I think… I think people mimic someone else’s colours when they’re in love with them.”

Dan swallowed hard.

He wished, he wished so very desperately, for a world in which he hadn’t been right about what yellow meant. 

Phil, however, seemed to have remained oblivious to it completely, or at the very least, was much better at keeping secrets than Dan could imagine managing to be. He prayed for the former, keeping silent as the family traipsed up the hill, smiling at them as they passed; Phil smiled back, because was the kind of boy he was, yellow, of course.

Yellow, he’d always been. Dan didn’t need any special powers or abilities to see that kind of truth so easily.

“You look alone.” Phil told him, all soft eyes, and sad smiles, and hands that didn’t know what to do with themselves, with fingers threaded between blades of grass, and palms stretched up out into the sky.

Dan twitched visibly, more than he should have allowed himself to; honesty was a visible colour on his skin, and not just to Phil Lester. He sat up, pulling his knees up to his chest, like some sort of makeshift barrier between himself and the rest of the world.

“What does that mean?” He asked, half-certain if he ought to fear the kind of answer he might find. Phil’s eyes made a promise of honesty, one too solid, like an island, out in a sea of blue green; Dan could write verse after verse about drowning in them.

“You look alone.” Phil repeated, holding his gaze with such care that he seemed to fear that it might break.

“What colour does alone look like?” Dan turned to face him, letting his guard drop, as his legs sunk down into the grass. Phil’s knee brushed against his- not that Dan noticed, because it truly wasn’t a noticeable thing, except, of course,  _ it was. _

Phil smiled at him too, for they were truly both mad enough to believe there was hope in yearning to keep this secret from one another, even now. 

“Alone isn’t a colour.” He said, at least, when the moment passed them by, and the beating of hearts in their chests became innocuous, not worth a man’s time, certainly not that of a boy’s.

“Then what is it?” Dan yearned for the answers, for Phil to fill his head with wonders and tokens of disbelief from a world that he could barely even dip his toes into. The world of the beyond, the world of dazzling colours and hints of the past like shivers down his spine; he knew, of course, that despite all its intrigue and allure, that such a world bore a weight that he couldn’t imagine carrying on his shoulders in any inclination of reality at all.

He imagined, perhaps, that it was what drew the line between them - who was treading water, and who was drowning.

“Alone is a fog, a mist, all around you, like you’re not really there- like you don’t want to be.” Phil moved a little closer to Dan, perhaps even subconsciously, or perhaps that was just what they both wanted to believe. 

This kind of thing didn’t feel quite so harmless when it could be regarded as purposeful, holding intent not like a bruise on its knee, but like war paint across its cheeks. This  _ thing _ between them, was of course, bruised and bloodied nonetheless.

“How do you get rid of a fog?” Dan asked, his voice wavering a little; his cheeks burned, like he’d lost his footing on a high ledge, in front of an awfully large audience, like he was a circus act who’d failed to woo the crowd.

“You don’t.” Phil etched his face into a frown; his eyes seemed to be searching for a smile, but for the life of them, they couldn’t find one. “Not really. It’s something you have to get out yourself.”

Dan’s face soured, considerably.

“But it’s not a permanent thing.” Phil assured him, with confidence, with the kind of honesty Dan didn’t doubt for a moment. 

“I wish…” Phil drew out a sigh, running his fingers through blades of grass, as one might do with someone else’s hair. “I wish you’d just tell me sometimes, what’s really on your mind.”

“I think…” Dan shook his head, smiling, but perhaps smiling all wrong - there was an insatiable kind of bitterness to it, a curt sensation of go down in flames or die trying. “I think you know enough about what’s on my mind than I’d already like.”

Phil skirted around the end of a smile; he was too cautious, too careful, with his fidgeting, unable to still, even with the warmth of the summer sun shining down upon them. 

“I fill in the gaps, you know?” Phil told him, eventually, with a voice softer than spider silk, woven from an essence seemingly just as otherworldly. “What you don’t tell me. I just fill in the gaps for myself.”

Dan frowned.

“I didn’t think you’d like that.”

“No.” Dan shook his head, his cheeks hollowing, like he was trying to relieve himself of a sour taste in his mouth, but wasn’t having very much luck with it. “I don’t.”

“Mmm…” Phil nodded, tracing patterns into the dirt, like one might do against someone’s skin.

Dan watched him, although pretending that he didn’t see. Phil imagined that it must be laborious - being him.

“Stop.” Dan told him, a little brashly, with all the air leaving his lungs at once. Phil snapped his neck up and held his gaze.

“Stop what?” Phil asked, his voice, gentle, curious, wading into a lake, perhaps on stepping stones, careful not to lose his balance.

“Stop filling in the gaps- you can’t just… you can’t just decide for yourself what kind of person I’m going to be- you can’t just… you can’t just…” Dan swallowed hard. “You can’t just decide for yourself what yellow means.”

“You know what yellow means.” Phil bit the inside of his cheek.

Dan hung his head low; he didn’t say a thing. He didn’t  _ need _ to.

“I see… someone with a fog around their head, like they’re distant from the world, and I have to unravel what it means, until finally the person tells me they feel alone, and then I get it- and it’s another puzzle piece of the world. It’s bothering me. The colour yellow. I need to know what it means.”

Dan shook his head. “No, you don’t.”

Phil frowned, abhorred, water suddenly rising, as he was forced to redefine the line at which he became ‘out of his depth’.

“No one person is supposed to have all the answers.” Dan shook his head, masquerading all these notions as ridiculous, and throwing them out to the wind like pieces of dirt lodged under his fingernails.

“I mean…  _ fuck.” _ Dan trailed off, staring up at the sky like he yearned to carve a hole in it. “We’re all fucking clueless compared to you. Maybe there’s one thing in the world that Phil Lester shouldn’t have the answers to, and maybe that’s the colour yellow, and maybe that’s-“

“It’s not about having all the answers.” Phil drew in a breath; he felt his heart pressed awfully close to his chest, feeling smaller, younger, than he had in a while now. “It’s not like that at all.”

“Then what is it like?” Dan asked, palms out, wild and gesturing, as if he was desperate to catch any remnants of sense that had drifted past them on the wind.

“I don’t like the idea that you’re keeping a secret from me.” Phil swallowed his shadow, and let the sun shine right through him, like he had barely been there at all.

“What’s wrong with secrets?” Dan asked, picking at the two of them, like they were just one great big unruly knot, tangled together, with no hope of ever once being untied. Inside his head, something greater than the both of them laughed at him.

_ ’What’s wrong with secrets?’. _ Phil smiled, knowingly, and Dan had never felt quite so  _ sixteen. _

“Nothing.” Phil stretched his legs out across the grass. They were long legs, and they ended up very much in Dan’s space, not that either of them had ever laid claim to any particular part of that hillside more than the other. There were no lines, no barriers, no rules, this far out away from the rest of the world, and perhaps that had been so much of the appeal.

Dan raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing.” Phil spoke with his hands, when he felt that his words didn’t quite suffice. Dan wrestled down thoughts about waxing poetic about those fingers. “Nothing, in principle.”

“Then  _ what?” _ Dan begged of him, not one for begging, but instead just desperate to clear the air.

“It’s just the idea that you feel like you  _ need _ to keep secrets from me.” Phil tugged out a sigh, like an unfortunate eventuality - something he’d left hidden at the back of a closet for months now, but with the overbearing weight of everything else, had tumbled out into the space between them.

Dan smiled. It was a sad little thing, but a smile nonetheless. Phil pitied it. Phil pitied him.

“Do you think that’s what I’m looking alone for?” Dan asked, although he supposed there was little point in asking the kinds of questions that you already knew the answers to.

Still, Phil humoured him, because that was the kind of thing that Phil Lester would do, if not for everyone, then for Dan Howell at the very least. “I think so. Maybe.”

“Or is this just an elaborate ruse to get me to tell you?” Dan cracked open a smile like a beverage; his cheeks glowed and brewed with the effervescence; his eyes however, took a swan dive back down to the lake.

“Maybe.” Phil bit his lip. Dan wondered what it would take to make it bleed. And immediately wished that he could bleach that kind of thought from his mind, only it seemed pre-determined that fate wouldn’t be pitying him today.

“Sometimes I miss before you told me about all of this.” Dan stretched his body out across the grass, busying his hands with interweaving several blades of grass, and his eyes with the intricate notions. It seemed a worthy distraction all round.

“What?” Phil popped open a smile, as if he’d spent weeks stashing it away some place, saving it for the occasion. “When I was just too nervous to tell you I pretty much knew what you were thinking? Are you going to try and tell me that  _ that _ was when you felt more comfortable?”

Dan made a face - it wasn’t a good one. “Where’s the line between comfortable and naive?”

Phil nudged him gently. Too gently. Dan wished Phil had nudged him harder, had damn near pummelled him into the Earth. Dan wished, most of all, that the way his cheeks were burning up, was something Phil couldn’t see.

Still, he was gentle smiles and soft eyes; Dan knew, through and through, that this was a body he didn’t deserve, in earnest, in hearts left out and sunburnt, in the train-lines between nowhere and forever. 

“That’s a line you have to draw for yourself.” Phil told him with ever so irritating knowing look about himself.

Dan watched him for what was perhaps too long; in defence, he was drawing a line of his own - the line between wanting to kiss a boy, and wanting to punch him.

He wondered, in fleeting, fearless moments, when he didn’t fear the kind of thoughts he was extruding and what Phil might take from them, just what would happen if he swallowed his pride whole and kissed Phil, just then and there, and nothing.

He imagined it would be radio static in his brain, and a colour Phil couldn’t quite make out; Dan was obnoxious to imagine that their first kiss would dizzy him endlessly. 

“Come on.” Phil told him, breaking into his thoughts a little too conveniently for it to be anything but intentional.

Dan tugged on the leash of a frown - if Phil was going to continue living one step ahead of him, then it only made sense that he ought to make the first move- if only… if only Phil wasn’t so polite, if only Phil hadn’t grown so used to waiting around for him. Dan felt the looming weight of responsibility like an endless pressure, and wished so dearly that with time, Phil might relieve it for him.

“Come on.” Phil said again, as if he’d managed to kid himself that with the first time, Dan hadn’t heard him. “You look cold. Let’s head home.”

“Cold.” Dan made a face, all endless laughter and walls after walls of facades. “What the fuck does cold look like?”

Phil narrowed his eyes at him, a little too affectionately. “You’re shivering.”

_ ”Oh.” _ Dan sucked in a breath. Somehow, it had been something that had escaped his attention.

He supposed, at the very least, that there was an awful lot else on his mind; sprawled out in an unruly heap - a thousand thoughts, bursting and gleaming, as if shards wrenched from the summer sun itself, for they all burned brighter than hell itself, but with the colour yellow.

Dan had started to wish, at the end of it all, that Phil’s abilities didn’t end with reading his emotions, but instead with  _ stealing _ them too.

-

“You’re yellow again.” 

Dan bit his lip. He was curled up on the rug in Phil’s attic, trying to be subtle, but nowhere near succeeding.

Phil was on his feet, dusting down the shelves, looking for something, something that had long since evaded Dan, or at least, he simply hadn’t been listening, even when the truth had mattered the most.

“Am I…?” Dan stammered, his cheeks heating up, as if threatening to burn.

“Yeah.” Phil chewed at the inside of his cheek. “I can  _ feel _ it.”

“Oh?” Dan raised his eyebrows.

“It’s quite distracting.”

Distracting was entirely the worst word Phil could have used.  _ Distracting _ had Dan's cheeks burning up and his eyes rolling back into their sockets like he'd been blinded by an endless sun. He swallowed hard, and hoped to knock the unfavourable truth back down with it. 

Phil only smiled at him. It was a wicked kind of knowing smile, so instantly went without all sentiment that might have once brigaded behind it. Phil Lester, as Dan had come to consider him, was perhaps the universe's worst creation, but by that very sentiment, his most treasured and favourite. 

"How can a colour be distracting?" Dan played dumb, asking him; he wished for a world in which he didn't know the answer to such a question all too well. 

Dan closed his eyes and put his mind to work pretending that there really was a world in which the colour yellow meant absolutely nothing. 

"You know?" Phil tugged away at a smile, like he was only halfway committed to working himself out of such a gruelling situation. His sentiment seemed to suggest that he’d even learned to quite like the way Dan's eyes felt upon his own, having set off in hope of answers. 

"Know what?" Dan worked away at a smile, yearning to hide his whole world away behind a blush, but found that he was hardly succeeding. 

"I'm sure the colour yellow is perfectly innocuous and ordinary to someone like you." 

"Someone like me?" Dan arched an eyebrow. "What's that supposed to mean?" 

Phil shook his head, amusement clasped tightly to his cheeks like the worst kind of promise. 

"I just meant someone who doesn't see colours floating around everyone they meet." 

"Oh." Dan did battle with a sigh. It was a battle that he lost. 

"What do you think I meant?" Phil was too intrigued, entirely. He was insufferable, but with an intoxicating appeal of mystery and a sunshine smile that didn't make the claim to solve all your problems but did just as much irregardless. 

"Nothing." Dan hummed to himself, cheeks burning red, leaving him shackled into the truth like a promise. 

The truth, of course, as rugged and unsavoury as it may be, was that Dan could never fear something as much as the way he imagined Phil might see him, through those 'enlightened' eyes of his. 

"You're being really distracting now. Not just with your colours but without yourself..." Phil's voice faltered a little. "With your..." He stammered, resorting to gesturing with his hands in absence of anything else. 

Dan smiled at him. Perhaps a little too fondly. 

"I'm being annoying." Dan filled in the blanks for him, masquerading over their bitter truth with a lazy kind of smile that didn't do them justice at all. 

"No." Phil exclaimed, a little too heavily on the side of exasperated. "You're not." He was adamant in his assurances. 

Dan tugged out a sigh; they both knew that despite all of Phil's pleading, he would always remain ultimately unconvinced. 

Phil moved over to the attic window. It was a small, pathetic excuse for a thing, wide and narrow, hugging the floor and covered almost entirely in dust. 

"What am I even distracting you  _ from?" _ Dan's eyebrows had been stitched together into a near perfect frown. Funnily enough, it seemed that the one detail as to just what the fuck they were doing up in the attic, was the one Phil had managed to omit.

"I would have told you, you know?" Phil chewed out a halfway formed frown, running delicate fingertips over the window pane and picking up the dust that had gathered there over what Dan suspected to be decades now. 

"If I hadn't been so distracting?" Dan bit back a smirk, terrified of getting ahead of himself and falling in too deep, even Phil would forever pledge to reel him back out again. 

"Yeah." Phil turned away from the window. "Something like that."

"So what is it then?" Dan demanded, growing impatient, with himself more than anything else. 

"I want to find you a ghost." Phil said, decidedly, although the content of his words bid to forever bar him from being taken seriously. 

"What?" Dan came out with a spluttering hoard of laughter. The truth of it all was that he simply couldn't contain himself, no matter how hard he might have theoretically managed to try. 

"I want to find you a ghost." Phil repeated himself, face stern, as if it was just the most normal thing in the world. Dan blinked up at him, hopelessly. 

"You don't really believe in this stuff." Phil moved away from the window, and sat back down on the rug beside Dan, perhaps a little too close to keep their hearts steady- not that Dan was noticing, of course. "I can tell. I want to show you something worth believing in."

"Oh." Dan choked up a response, a little too caught up in the intricacies of Phil's sentiment to cough up any form of adequate response. "Thank you...?" 

"I thought it'd be a nice way to spend an afternoon." Phil mused, shuffling closer to Dan. "And it's raining today so I don't suppose you want to go out much."

"I know you're really committed to the whole special and otherworldly thing but like I'd be perfectly happy just to sit and play video games with you, I-" 

"Dan." Phil stopped him, his voice louder than it had been before, but retained the tone at which it had been whispered so softly. "I  _ want _ to do this. I worry sometimes, that you don't believe any of this, you know, that you just think I'm crazy- that you're just going along with this to me make happy, and I- I don't want that." 

Dan frowned, thinking for a moment, or perhaps lost somewhere on the way between thought and non-being. 

"Do you really think I'd do that to you?" His shoulders slouched in towards his chest, his whole body paling a little. 

"I..." Phil stammered; he found that things didn't quite translate so plainly. 

"It's just..." Phil trailed off, trying again but not getting very far. 

"I'd never do that to you. I couldn't. I physically  _ couldn't  _ do that to you." He shook his head, his heart sinking through his chest, as if anchored with a heavy leaden weight back down to his toes. 

"I worry." Phil bit his fingernails. "Sometimes. About the things you feel like you have to try and keep secret from me." 

Dan's chest, with a weight keeping his heart heavy and his breath shallow, made hard work of bringing his heart back up again. Still, it was only a matter of time until he felt that fluttering feeling in the back of his throat again, raining down the worst kind of feeling like shards of confetti. 

"Am I still yellow?" Dan asked him, holding his breath, finding that he'd truly learned to fear the kind of answer he might find dangling on the end of such a question. 

Phil nodded. Dan felt the way he didn't even have to look up at him like a painstaking kind of weight in his chest. Phil just  _ knew _ . Phil could  _ feel _ it. 

Lowering his voice a little, Phil turned his head and asked him. "Dan, what does yellow mean?" 

Dan tugged away at a sigh, reminiscent of a storm brewing below the surface of his skin. "You  _ know  _ what yellow means."

"But I  _ don't." _ Phil's frustration came out to the tune of laughter with him. It was the most maddening thing. 

"You do." Dan told him, hopeless, pleading, and tugging at the fibres of the rug between his fingertips. 

Again, he wished for a miracle, for a ghost to join them, for anything to take their silence by the throat and snap it clean in two. And for the first time, something out there seemed to be listening. 

_ "Dan."  _  Phil's eyes widened, his gaze remaining fixated on a shadow cast onto the wall before them. 

As Dan turned his head in inclination of Phil's gaze, he noticed, irreversibly, that the shadow cast onto the wall was a shadow that was entirely out of place. Sure enough, as he turned his head back to the attic behind them, he confirmed that there was no such object that could have reasonably cast such a darkened silhouette, and so  _ human _ too. 

It had Dan stick to his stomach - just staring at it, like that. 

"What is that?" Dan asked, his words more like a plea to the darkness than anything formally directed at Phil. 

Still,  _ "That,"  _  Phil told him, "that is the colour white, so bright it's blinding." 

And Dan stared up at it with wide, open eyes.

“It’s beautiful.” He murmured, his words pressed from his lips like a promise, like an old flower between the pages of a book - perhaps an old bible in a forgotten language, or a tome of spells equally as holy.

Phil watched Dan stare at the figure, with all the wonder in the world, for the boy who saw the extraordinary everyday, it was the brightness in Dan’s eyes that took itself upon as a miracle that afternoon.

_ ”She.” _ Phil ushered, his voice soft, like a sunrise, like the end of times, coming like waves of calm water. He was the slow tide that preluded the tsunami that would crush a town into fragments of bone.

“What?” Dan stammered, a flutter of eyelashes and features tinged pink.

“She.” Phil repeated himself, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Something finally clicked in Dan’s brain, turning back to the figure with a new sense of regard; he hadn’t, at first, taken the thing to be human enough to be anchored to notions such as gender, but he realised at last, that they’d all been something once.

“What’s her name?” Dan asked, hushing his voice a little; he felt awfully impolite, especially since he definitely seemed to be within earshot, although admittedly, he knew so very little of the auditory capabilities of the otherworldly.

“I don’t know.” Phil got to his feet, carrying himself with a sense of regality, with a sense of importance ushered into that head on his shoulders; something that Dan couldn’t quite fathom in the scheme of things. “Ask her.”

The figure fizzled a little, growing brighter and dimmer with the reflections of the light. Phil reached out a hand, wavering dangerously into her space; despite all expectation, she didn’t fade nor move away.

“I don’t think she speaks…” Dan murmured, more to himself than anything else; he didn’t want to risk sounding like he had the nerve to brand himself as an expert, to even suppose that he held some sort of leverage in this new crazy of world of colours and things beyond sense itself.

“Everything speaks.” Phil told him, simply, like he was ignorant, not just confused. “It’s just a matter of whether you can understand them or not.”

“And can I…?” Dan chewed away at his lip, cheeks burning up as he yearned to slot his heart back into a perfectly carved caricature of himself - another day, another boy, another facade. The cold, lifeless blur of a figure seemed to regard him with pity.

“No.” Phil seemed a little burdened by such a conclusion. “No, I don’t think you can.”

“Can you?” Dan asked, doting on the maddened side of hopeless.

Phil tilted his head to one side, regarding the figure curiously; it seemed, somehow, as if he was utterly unable to produce an answer, or at least, stumble upon a conclusion.

Silence grew skin thick enough to deem itself overrated, as two, unearthly hands emerged from the pool of light that the figure seemed to commander somehow. The first of the two hands reached out to Phil; trusting, or perhaps naive, Phil opened up his palm to take it, and Dan watched with wide-eyes, as the skin turned soft, human, against his.

The second of the two hands outstretched to him, but it was the weight of Phil’s eyes on him alone that had Dan’s hand protruding out into the air. There was a voice at the back of his mind, screaming at him, telling him that this was anything but what he should be doing with himself, but he paid it not any attention. It seemed, that some miracles, no matter how ghastly, just could not be ignored.

The hand felt cold against him, with a little too much force behind its grip, and yet no sense of feeling in the fingertips, as if it was a dreadful approximation of a human hand, as opposed to a real one, at all. Yet Dan felt he pitied her somehow, this ghost resigned to the attic of the Lester family home, who seemed to have been coaxed out of eternal slumber by the musings of two utterly dreadful teenage boys.

“What happens now?” Dan turned to Phil, expectantly, as if he imagined so dotingly that this boy wore the answers to every question ever fathomable upon his head like a crown.

“I…” Phil didn’t quite get time to string up an answer to such an impossible question, for an even more impossible feat imposed itself on the silence cast between them.

It was barely noticeable at first. Subtle, soft, like a caress of cold skin, like a whisper pushed through the darkness like the footsteps of a memory, like the pre-emptive notion of rain, hanging impatiently upon the morning air. It was barely noticeable at first, yet with time, it was unavoidable.

Such was the nature of the colour yellow, or perhaps more literally, the yellow glow that had come to emanate from the points at which their hands were held close.

Then like a curse, like a sickness, like a disease, like the doting indoctrination of shamelessly unstoppable, heart-sick intoxication, the glow spread up through the air, gathering speed like a fog, multiplying like a rot - one no amount of doting could assimilate. 

It was within minutes, that the figure was consumed by yellow light completely, burnt out like a bulb, like a blown fuse, for within seconds the figure vanished, as if she had never been there at all, leaving an inconsolable darkness in her place, and a room that felt inclined awfully towards the unsettling side of cold.

Phil stared down at his hands, as if he struggled to believe that they were quite attached to himself any longer. Dan stared at Phil; it was something his mind had come to default to in absence of all else.

“It’s me.” His words were ghostly upon his lips, barely a whisper, and nothing else. “Isn’t it?”

Dan didn’t respond, although they both knew for sure that the question was directed at him.

“It’s me.” Phil repeated to himself, for lack of a proper audience. “That’s what the colour yellow means.”

-

The world felt like a dream.

Daniel Howell was all hazy eyes come Sunday evening, as he’d resigned himself to the least savoury corners of his head. There was someone, somewhere, equidistant between his heart and his head, making sense of this situation for him, but he didn’t have it within him to listen to reason.

The local park felt like a worthy opponent, to his distaste for the world, to his head fallen straight off his shoulders, and a body too sluggish and unresponsive to pick it back up again.

He slotted his body in perfectly to the swings, his legs kicking him back and forth slowly. He felt alone, silhouetted by the late night, street light glow. If Phil were with him, he imagined that he would have told him that he looked alone too.

Only such was not the case. The truth was bitter and filed away with secrets that felt too acrid and poignant against their tongues. Secrets, that it seemed, just weren’t secrets anymore.

He was a hazy silhouette through the late night air, and still he was a prince among men. It was no psychic affliction that gave Dan that tugging feeling inside his chest, but something so much more fragile, so much more volatile, so much more human instead.

Phil was silent, wordless, in joining him on the swings; he cared not to dish out an explanation, simply just to share the moment between them. All that was necessary had already been uttered by the silence and stolen gazes. Dan wondered if Phil was thinking about it, the truth, the hurt,  _ them. _ Last of all, he wondered what colour he was glowing out through the late night air, and how Phil might entangle a mystery such as that.

“She told me you’d be out here.” Phil said at last, his voice soft against the late night air, like a gentle caress that didn’t quite dare jump the distance between them.

“Who? The ghost?” Dan made a face - it was forever a question of another night, another facade.

“No.” Phil smiled, shaking his head; he seemed to radiate something Dan couldn’t quite put a name to. Still, it felt like warmth.  _ ”Louise.” _

“Oh…” Dan hummed out a blush, kicking at the asphalt beneath his feet.

Phil smiled at him. Forever, after everything else, Phil smiled at him.

“You wouldn’t have told anyone where you were if you didn’t want to be found.” He dug away at the truth, indifferent to the hole he created where it had once been.

“I had to tell her.” Dan bit his lip. He almost wanted it to bleed. “She worries.”

Phil turned his smile out to the asphalt, sliding his trainers back and forth against the ground between them. “I worry too.” He mumbled, leaving his words feeling illicit, like a secret that should be kept between his head and his heart.

Dan tugged in a breath, pretending not to feel the way his heart rattled against his ribcage.

“My mum’s turquoise.” Phil began, his voice soft, subtle, but digging so very deep.

Dan held his breath, wondering if like that, it just might hurt less. He had no hope with that kind of wishful thinking, though.

“At dinner tonight, whenever she walked into the room and smiled at him, my dad just… he lit up turquoise too.” Phil continued, stopping to clear his throat. “I don’t usually pay attention to my family. I mean, there are so many distractions at home, even if things aren’t loud physically, it’s just… loud emotionally - in a  _ good _ way, but… I paid attention… it felt like I ought to tonight.”

Dan tugged away at a breath, the truth staining his skin the same shade of yellow.

“I never really thought I’d be  _ yellow, _ you know?” Phil played onto a smile, like his words weighed nothing at all, like they weren’t grating bare against their skin.

“Phil, I-“ Dan began, or at least tried to; he was lazy with his words, his head confronted by the great, egregious mess of it all. 

“But yellow’s a nice colour to be, you know?” Phil finished for him, taking some of the weight onto his shoulder.

Dan held his breath, waiting for the moment to sever him in two.

“Yellow looks good on you, at least.” Phil turned away, his cheeks harbouring a blush.

Dan fell silent. Speechless, was perhaps, a better word for it.

Phil looked up, meeting his eyes, gaining confidence, gaining something in their shared, silent moments. “Yellow looks good on you.” He told him, properly.

Dan blushed, looking down, all rosy cheeks, and bright eyes. Again, he felt so very sixteen years old.

“I wish you could have told me, you know?” Phil began, his voice slow, like a winding river, like the gentle spring breeze. “I mean… it shouldn’t have come out the way it did, I… maybe that was my fault-“

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Phil smiled. “Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. I knew, anyway, I just wanted you to be able to tell me on your own terms-“

“You  _ knew?” _ Dan choked out, his eyes blown wide. It was something he’d always suspected, but hearing the words float from Phil’s lips like that was something else entirely.

Phil couldn’t subdue a snort. Dan rolled his eyes back into his skull. 

“You… you’re not exactly  _ discreet.” _ Phil managed, struggling to quite find the words.

Dan squeezed his eyes shut, willing out the world for just a moment. “I…” He shook his head. “Phil…  _ I… _ you know things would have been  _ much _ easier if you’d just-… you’d  _ said _ something-“

“It was yours to bring up.” Phil shook his head, firm, decided.

“Just because I can sense something from the way I see you, doesn’t mean that it’s mine to know, or at least mine to bring up to you- unless you make it clear that you want me to-“

“You just said I was hardly being  _ discreet-“ _

“Still, there’s a difference between a crush and wanting to initiate anything. And… you’re younger than me and-“

“Don’t start.” Dan shook his head. “Don’t even start. Don’t even  _ start.” _

“Are you saying you wouldn’t have freaked out if I’d just kissed you out of nowhere?” Phil narrowed his eyes, his face a perfect picture of disbelief, arguing a strong case that he knew Dan better than Dan knew himself.

“No, I- wait  _ what?” _ Dan stammered, looking Phil up and down. “You just- you wanted to kiss me? You  _ want..? _ To kiss me?”

Phil sighed. “Who  _ doesn’t _ want to kiss you, Dan Howell?”

Dan flustered, stammering, was caught between a blush and a laugh. “I… uhh… like…  _ everyone.” _

“Shut up.” Phil told him, getting up from the swing beside him. “Shut up.” He repeated, firm, sincere.

Silent, still, Dan watched as Phil disappeared out a little way into the darkness.

_ ”Phil?” _ He called out after him, jumping to his feet, and making a hasty attempt at a jog, or perhaps a fast walk out after him.

“Phil?” He called again, following Phil out to the path. 

He stood, waiting, illuminated, basking, in full glow of a street. He didn’t say a word; his eyes said enough, beckoning him over to join him.

“Phil…” Dan tried again, his voice softer this time, as a result of the fleeting distance, stepping into the light, stepping into Phil’s space.

Forever, Phil Lester smiled at him.

He shook his head in disbelief. “The whole  _ world _ wants to kiss you, Dan Howell.” His words came like a promise, one that sank in deep.

“Shut up.” Dan told him, unable to hold his gaze, cheeks flushed a brilliant shade of forever pink. “You’re  _ wrong.” _

“Funnily enough.” Phil inched himself closer, moving so slowly that it was painful. “I don’t tend to be wrong, do I?”

Dan gazed up at him, for the first time, with a look in his eyes that Phil couldn’t read.

“Yellow looks good on you.” Phil murmured, lost in those eyes. Dan blushed, readily, eyes open wide. “Not like sunlight, but like stardust. Maybe less like yellow, and maybe sometimes more like  _ gold. _ Like you’ve swallowed the stars whole.”

Dan bit back a smirk. “Then don’t you want to see what stardust tastes like?” He was so  _ very,  _ unavoidably sixteen years old.

Phil’s eyes rolled back so far into his head that he could have  _ smacked _ him, but chance would have it that fate was on their side tonight, because Phil Lester kissed him instead.

It was slow, gentle, a beginning, a middle, and an ending all blurred into one. The world was limitless, curled up in the palms of their hands, intertwined.

The moment ended, as all moments do.

“So what  _ does _ stardust taste like?” Dan asked, giddy, teasing.

Phil shook his head, rolling his eyes.  _ ”You.” _

“And what does that mean?” Dan begged, pleaded.

“Limitless, forever, ethereal. A sunset and a sunrise at the same time. Like all the colours lilac and yellow gold intertwined.”

-

Dan was all feathered curls and flushed pink lips. He wasn’t yellow, but instead a shimmery shade of gold.

Phil watched him from the windowsill, with eyes older than time itself.

The morning was just beginning, the world cast anew, crowning two teenage boys as its newest divines.

“Morning.” Phil murmured, his words like a caress to the breeze, and long legs extended out into the air.

Dan looked up, blinking hazily. He’d harboured a certain disconnect between sense and the world that stood around him. Such, he imagined, was a surely expected byproduct of kissing Phil Lester.

Kissing Phil Lester.

He sat bolt upright in bed, at once drowning in the memories of the night prior. Of the idle walks home, of Phil by his side, of kiss after kiss after kiss, and a world once broken but now bridged between them.

Dan blinked disbelievingly at his surroundings.

Phil only smiled at him. “You know that poem of yours? You ever finish it?”

Rubbing his eyes, Dan dragged out a smile. “It was for you, you know?”

Phil smirked. “Oh, I always did.”

“But is it finished?”

“No.” Dan shook his head. “I think the world will end and the stars will come crashing down from the sky before I’ll ever run out of things to say about you.”

“God, that’s so pretentious.”

Dan snorted. “You love it though, don’t you?”


End file.
